


Into the Gloaming

by Vulpesmellifera



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Child Death, Corvids, Fever Dreams, Grief/Mourning, Heavy Angst, Hopeful Ending, M/M, Mentions of Cancer, Mythology References, or are they?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-04
Updated: 2020-09-18
Packaged: 2021-03-06 14:55:36
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 8,385
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26290732
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Vulpesmellifera/pseuds/Vulpesmellifera
Summary: She lays the sage bundle down in one of his seashells, avoiding the label. How he loved cataloging natural items. That sharp mind of his so naturally tended to the sciences, and she’d taken great joy in encouraging him all his life. All the first thirteen years of it. The last year has been entirely different.His hand lies just outside the white comforter. When she touches it, the chill of his skin sends a shiver down her spine. His lips move, his voice as soft as dead, dry leaves.“What’s that, love?” she says.“In the trees,” he says, his eyes still closed. “Is it John there in the trees? I think he’s waiting for me.”Viola turns her gaze out the window and to the closest tree, a resplendent cherry in the throes of autumn. In the branches there, for just a second, she thinks she sees it: a black bird, feathers gleaming in the sun.
Relationships: Sherlock Holmes/John Watson
Comments: 51
Kudos: 92





	1. A Carrion Bird

**Author's Note:**

> This is not my usual. But it is special to me, and perhaps some of you may enjoy it. With lots of love, Vulpes.
> 
> Thank you so much to hippocrates460 for the loving beta.
> 
> *Written in memory of a boy who loved crows.*

> “We should go forth on the shortest walk, perchance, in the spirit of undying adventure, never to return, - prepared to send back our embalmed hearts only as relics to our desolate kingdoms.”
> 
> \- Henry David Thoreau, _Walking_

It started with a headache unlike any other. 

Sharp, stabbing pains in the temple like the blade of a knife sliding between the parietal and temporal plates. The pain migrated down his neck and churned his stomach with bouts of intense nausea. Blurred his vision at times, impaired his balance at others. 

Migraine medication was prescribed first, followed by a string of doctor’s visits, and finally specialists with tests and large, loud machinery. Whispered conversations with his parents out of earshot, until finally the phrase “brain tumour” was uttered in his presence. Not long after came the word “inoperable.” This led to chemotherapy and radiation, followed by experimental treatments, and his mother’s desperate efforts with homeopathy and acupuncture. Small successes when the tumour shrank, a devastating failure when it stopped responding to treatment, and grew. 

Sherlock lies in a hospital bed. The bed sits beside the large picture window in his parents’ living room. The window frame is eggshell white and through the clear panes he can see the bird feeders. His binoculars, now too heavy for him to lift, gather dust on the sill. His father bought him a scope, but he can’t lift his hands enough anymore to move it. His mother or the hospice worker, Mrs Hudson, have to prop him up to look through it. So instead, he stares out the window, where the shadows of birds can be seen flitting about the feeders as he drifts in and out of a morphine-induced slumber.

On the built-in shelves beside him, below the windows, are favourite keepsakes from over the years - heart-shaped rocks, interesting pebbles, birds’ nests, bits of fur, feathers, snakeskin, bones, a turtle’s shell, seashells, and dried seaweed. His careful handwriting stands out on the labels. He’d identified them when he was able, and strong. They are scattered among books on anatomy, ecology, mathematics, board games, and 3D puzzles, all intended to keep him amused as he wasted away to nothing but a skeletal frame.

It’s always cold, but he hardly notices anymore. More pressing is the need for morphine, as one side of his face bulges with the tumor. A medulloblastoma that obscures the vision in his right eye and makes his head appear misshapen. His mother covered the mirror over the fireplace and the bathroom.

He hasn’t seen the inside of that bathroom in a week though.

One avian silhouette catches his attention now - one that’s been hanging around more and more as of late. The bird perches in the nearby weeping cherry tree, its leaves like dripping orange flames at this time of year. Sometimes Sherlock thinks that the bird, perhaps a crow, is waiting for him. 

Somewhere at the back of his head, a thought forms: crows carry the dead to their next destination. It’s not that he gives much credit to myth, old or new, but this thought assails his mind as he watches the black shadow hop from one branch to another. A stack of comics lay near him, which his mother or his aunts will read from time to time. _The Crow_ lies among them.

Life has become all about drifting. Sliding, skimming, across bouts of wakefulness. Bladder pressure means he signals his mother or Mrs Hudson for the jug. Boredom means he stares out and watches the birds. Telly is too painful - too loud, for sure, but also, stringing together meaning from the dialogue has become strenuous. His aunts look at him with red-rimmed eyes and his mother, bless his mother, she’s done everything she can to make him feel as if this is all normal and perfectly alright.

And like hell it is.

* * *

A mother keeps her eyes on the child, like being riveted to the vaulted acts of a tightrope walker. A mother is the net, spread thin and wide, waiting below - and now she’s spread so thin as to be unhelpful. Threads fraying. Snapping. Somehow, she missed him when he fell.

Kahlil Gibran writes “Your children are not your children. They are the sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself.” This rings true deep inside her chest, and still, she can’t help but feel selfish. That somehow it’s true for other mothers, but not true for herself. That Sherlock is hers.

Now Viola Holmes stands outside, waiting for Mrs Hudson to finish her assessment. She’ll take Sherlock’s vitals and rub salve onto his bedsores while making sure he’s comfortable. Then they’ll have their quiet conversation out here on the porch where his sharp ears can’t hear. 

Though, his ears aren’t that much of a concern any longer. 

She lights a cigarette. With Siger gone out for the day, she’s not concerned about his disapproving stare. Draws the smoke into her lungs, revels in the dip of oxygen that dizzies her head. Sometimes, she could scream. Scream in the middle of this American suburban neighborhood with its rosebushes and its azaleas and its perfectly green lawns outside of immense brick houses, cottage-style all, but ostentatious in their splendour. Money couldn’t buy her son’s life, and she’s spent more than enough to prove it. Not that the insurance was any help - if she’d known this illness was coming, she’d have made Siger keep his job in London, rather than move here to this New England town to follow after a bigger salary. This is the kind of neighbourhood where people run and do yoga and wear lululemon even when they aren’t doing either of those activities. Where Lexus and beamers are parked in driveways, where people hire landscapers and housekeepers. No one smokes, except the men on occasion. Expensive cigars. 

But she doesn’t care that the neighbours can see her with this one cigarette. Fuck ‘em. Her son is dying, and she wishes she were next.

Mrs Hudson opens the screen door. Viola becomes aware of the way she must look - her hair and nails haven’t been done in weeks. Bits of his breakfast are still on her jumper. 

“He’s alert today,” Mrs Hudson says. She’s a kindly woman, who loves to bake and cleans even though that wasn’t what she was hired to do. She makes a ton of tea and fusses over Sherlock and Viola every day she’s here. If Viola wasn’t so done with religion, she’d swear the woman was an angel incarnate. She doesn’t even glance at the cigarette in Viola’s hand. 

“Yeah,” Viola says. These conversations have grown shorter and shorter. They both know what’s coming, and very little needs to be said at this point.

“Can I make you some tea?”

Viola almost snorts, but it takes too much energy. “Been thinking about that book you gave me. Kahil Gibran. What he has to say about children.”

Mrs Hudon touches her arm. Her floral perfume wafts over the acrid stench of cigarette. “And?”

“And it makes me think of all those stupid sayings, like ‘move heaven and earth.’ Goddamnit, of course anyone would move heaven and earth for their bloody kids. You’d catch the moon, you’d pluck the stars from the sky if you could. If he needed it and if I could, I’d reach into the sky and just snatch the moon from the darkness and hand the bloody rock to him, just for him, our moon. Just to see the reflective light in his face as he’d look at it in wonder, and then in wonder at me, at the might of his mother. But that’s not what it is. At the end of the day, people are just animals and subject to all the same laws of nature. At the end of the day, it’s all a bunch of rot.”

Mrs Hudson pats her arm. “Those sayings are a bunch of rot. What you can do, though, is love him.”

Viola’s eyes are hot and wet. She rubs out the cigarette on the bottom of her sandal and tosses it into a flower pot of dead geraniums. “Yeah. And isn’t that bugger-all, too.”

When she gets back inside, she lights a sage bundle. It not only conceals the smell of cigarettes, but also drives away the medicinal odour in the house. As she walks from room to room, she is reminded of their extravagant life by shelves of statuary and other remembrances of their exotic travels. Below the painting collection started by her husband, of the latest in modern expressionism. Walks past the furnishing from Crate & Barrel and West Elm, the mid-century modern tables and chairs and throws. Her feet pad softly on the wool rug hand-woven by an artist in Maine. All this money, all this success, and still, her son will die.

She enters the living room where he’s now ensconced. Warped, near unrecognizable to her in his sickbed. He’s grown so thin, she knows his ribs jut out like spiral fluting on a marble column. His legs like the legs of a bloody stork, and his face, his beautiful face, marred by a metastatic deformity. He was the head of his class every year. Not the type of boy to suffer fools, he didn’t have many friends, but he was headstrong and in her eyes, he was perfect.

She lays the sage bundle down in one of his seashells, avoiding the label. How he loved cataloging natural items. That sharp mind of his so naturally tended to the sciences, and she’d taken great joy in encouraging him all his life. All the first thirteen years of it. The last year has been entirely different.

His hand lies just outside the white comforter. When she touches it, the chill of his skin sends a shiver down her spine. His lips move, his voice as soft as dead, dry leaves.

“What’s that, love?” she says.

“In the trees,” he says, his eyes still closed. “Is it John there in the trees? I think he’s waiting for me.”

Viola turns her gaze out the window and to the closest tree, a resplendent cherry in the throes of autumn. In the branches there, for just a second, she thinks she sees it: a black bird, feathers gleaming in the sun.


	2. A Keeper of Memory

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The playlist that helped to facilitate this work is [here](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/2GlazSdFrXp1WYNzrCs8li?si=XF8f7nLRRqaw5KaLWQddIg).

Smoke and feathers skitter away, then fade like fog under the sun. In their place, a bird appears. Neither large nor small, black as soot, with a set of beady eyes and a beak that gleams like wet pebbles. 

Sherlock stares. It’s neither crow nor jackdaw, nor magpie, but something about the bird seems familiar. “Do I know you?” he asks.

The bird tilts its head and opens its beak: “As well as anyone could know another.”

As strange as it is that the bird talks, Sherlock isn’t afraid, or surprised. It’s more of a relief. The pressure in his chest eases as he glances around. This is a liminal space, a place where reality bends and weaves. He’s been lingering at the edge of this place for days, unable to penetrate the fog to get here. Now that he’s here, it’s useful to have a guide. Walking in this dream-like space, it’s not really shocking at all that a bird should talk.

Corvids are his favourite species among all animals on earth. A family of brilliant birds, birds that can communicate complex ideas, mimic human speech, remember faces, manipulate tools, and count at a basic level. He’d always wanted a crow or a raven as a pet, so he could teach it tricks and test its ability to solve puzzles. 

“What’s your name?” he asks.

“I have many names,” says the bird.

_ He’s fascinating. _ A name slips into Sherlock’s mind. “Hm. Then I’ll call you John.”

“If it suits you,” the bird says.

Sherlock looks around. “Are we in my dreams or yours?”

“Neither,” John says. “Both.”

_ Fascinating, but maybe not helpful.  _ “You think you’re clever?”

The bird laughs, a throaty, raspy caw-laugh. “Not half so clever as you.”

Sherlock’s eyes sweep over the bird’s black claws and stick legs, the angle of the tail and the smoothness of the head’s feathers. “You don’t look like one of England’s corvids.”

“I’m not just one of England’s corvids.” The bird hops closer, peering at Sherlock. “You don’t remember anything, do you?”

It’s an odd thing to say. “What am I to remember?” 

“Yourself.”

“That makes no sense. I’m right here.”

John hops closer. “I’d like to take you on a journey.” His dark eyes seem serious, as serious as a bird’s eyes can be.

“Do I look like Joseph Campbell’s hero?”

The bird makes a sound like a scoff. “Who’s Joseph Campbell?”

“He’s...nevermind.” What use is it to explain that to a bird?

The bird watches him. Seems to make a decision. “Follow me.” He takes off.

The scene around him changes.

* * *

Viola stands in the doorway and listens to Mrs Hudson talk to Sherlock as she crochets. It’s an afghan in a frenzy of colours that don’t seem like they should belong together, but they do, a mosaic of patchwork that reminds her of old stained glass windows.

“Oh, the sights of London are wonderful, aren’t they?” Mrs Hudson’s says. “I was thinking I might take a trip to the London Zoo with my niece and her child this summer. Or perhaps the Tower of London. My grandniece would love the zoo, of course.”

Sherlock mumbles, but Viola can’t quite catch it.

“My niece is a nurse. She doesn’t get a lot of time off, mind you.”

“Sherlock wanted to be a diagnostician,” Viola finds herself saying. Mrs Hudson turns to look at her. “He, um, he said it was like being a detective and a doctor all at once, and those were two of his favourite careers.”

Mrs Hudson smiles, soft and gentle. “He would have made an amazing diagnostician.” She reaches out and pats the bedside where he lays, quiet now. “You know, he seems to spend a lot of time talking to someone named John. Is that a friend of his, dear?”

Viola’s fingers fly to her mouth. “John was his imaginary friend when he was little. Sherlock said he was a crow.” He was such a precocious child, curly-headed and willful. 

“John says he’d like corn on the cob for dinner,” Sherlock would announce as he would clamber into a chair, eyepatch over one eye and cardboard sword in hand.

“Oh, does he?” Viola would ask, good-humoured. 

John went away eventually, as if Sherlock had forgotten all about him. She clutches at her chest as she watches him rest. To think, John would be back now, like he was the pair of bookends on Sherlock’s life story.

A little sigh slips from Sherlock’s lips. Viola looks away as she remembers that any day now, one of those little sighs will be his last, the story coming to its end.

* * *

“Once, I was called Muninn,” John says. “We flew all over the world, we saw more things than even the sun saw.” Sherlock watches John as he talks - he’s a very handsome bird. It’s not something he’s likely to think about anyone, but John’s unassuming nature and glossy black feathers capture his interest.

They stand at a great precipice, a canyon wider and longer than anything Sherlock has ever seen. The wind ruffles Sherlock’s pyjamas and ripples through John’s feathers. He doesn’t feel cold, but he’d rather have some sun. Nothing seems to grow here. 

At the ledge stands an old man leaning on a spear. A winged helmet sits at his feet. When he turns, he fixes one eye on Sherlock, his mouth drawn into a tight frown. His other eye is closed. His beard is long, grey, tangled with dead leaves and twigs. Sherlock can almost smell his rank breath. Something about him hooks Sherlock’s attention - he is familiar. Like John is. This man was once mighty, but now a fading echo of himself.

“Odin gave us our voices,” John says. His voice is somber. “He always did fear your leaving him.”

“My leaving him?” Sherlock says, perplexed. “I - you’re the bird!”

“We gave him his wisdom and his knowledge. Huginn and Muninn, thought and emotion, the ravens which provided him with his needs.”

Sherlock snorts. “That doesn’t make any sense.”

The scene changes again: wind-whipped by passing soldiers on horseback, assailed by a great battle taking place all around them. The rolling thunder of hard hooves hitting the earth and the clanging of swords against shields assaults their ears, and the smell of blood and smoke hangs sharp in the air. The one-eyed man is larger now, mightier, his beard groomed of its twigs and leaves, and he rides a giant horse with more legs than a horse should have. He hefts a spear over one broad shoulder and aims ahead of him. 

A gigantic raven flies in his wake, swooping and calling. Two sleek wolfhounds flank his horse, the whites of their eyes seen from where Sherlock stands. 

The man and his companions charge a fearsome beast - a hulking monster of a wolf with teeth bared and spittle flying. Sherlock’s mouth falls open and his heart hammers once he sights the terror - it’s unlike anything he’s ever seen.

“The raven is you, Huginn, and the battle is your bread and the blood of the fallen your wine,” John says, as if by rote. 

Sherlock stares, wide-eyed, as horse and wolf-beast meet, the creature’s tremendous jaws opening as if it means to swallow horse and man whole. Raven, too. Its mouth opens so wide it shades the world as if night had fallen. The battle scene fades into the beetle-black darkness. “What’s happened? I can’t see them anymore!” Sherlock cranes his neck, though fear and astonishment ripple through him.

“Hmph. One of the many benefits to being shadow-feathered is to disappear in the blackness,” John says. “You know, once upon a time our feathers were white, but jilted Apollo’s breath did blow, and our feathers were scorched to black. You don’t remember?”

Sherlock doesn’t bother to correct the bird on why he, a human boy, wouldn’t remember something so nonsensical.

Though…

“I think I read that in a book, once.”

John chuckles. “A book? You have become very human.”

* * *

As her son mumbles about crows in his reedy whisper, she can see it now, in the branches. The form of a crow, but not like any crow she’s seen in England. The bird seems as if he’s looking through the window, and right onto the fitful form of her sleeping Sherlock.

“Sherlock?” she says.

Sherlock opens his eyes. In this light they’re pale blue-green like his father’s. Siger has been in his study all morning, likely with a drink.

“Hi sleepyhead,” she says.

“Did you know crows sometimes have funerals for dead crows?” he asks.

She bites her lip. They’d looked this up once - people claiming to have seen crows gathering around the body of a deceased crow. 

“They leave sticks by the crow. Do you think it's payment for the ferryman?” Sherlock goes on. “Will I need something to pay him?”

It’s the sort of question Sherlock would have asked her when he was young and small. Not this skeletal figure on the cusp of manhood. 

She presses her hand onto his chest and makes soothing, circling motions. “Don’t worry, love, we’ll make sure you have everything you need for the crossing.” 

There isn’t enough gold in the world to fill the splintering break in her heart. It’ll lie in pieces, rattling around inside her chest like shattered porcelain.


	3. Death's Handmaiden

Viola watches as Mrs Hudson turns Sherlock over and adjusts his pillows. 

“Is that better, love?” Mrs Hudson smiles at her charge.

“Yeah,” he rasps. His voice has been getting weaker. Now it’s like the brush of paper across a desk and Viola has to lean forward to hear him. “My head hurts.”

Mrs Hudson administers the morphine. Viola’s still holding his urine bottle. She’s finding it harder and harder to leave his side, even though she knows she needs to dispose of the urine and rinse out the bottle. 

“Let me take that, you stay here. Sit down.” Viola wonders if she looks as pale as she feels. Like the blood has been leaving her body and she’s mummifying before everyone’s eyes. 

She sinks into the floral armchair that now occupies the space beside the hospital bed. White, patterned with red roses, bluebells, yellow buttercups and twining green vines. It could work as a wallpaper. And then they could just wallpaper over her and she could sit quietly with her thoughts, and no one would notice her.

* * *

This time a woman stands beside him. She’s tall, dark-skinned, wearing a cloak of rippling and shimmering black feathers. She’s striking to look upon, with muscular, bare arms and an unrelenting stare. Her head is shaved, and her jaw is set. She's regal, and she's proud.

“Hello,” Sherlock says, though he feels a little wrong-footed and out of place. Where's John?

“Hello, Sherlock,” the strange woman says. “You ate their food, but you are not bound to their world, you know.” Her voice echoes in the air around him.

Sherlock's eyes flicker about. “Where are we?”

“This place has many names.” She points to a wide river that he hadn’t noticed. It must have just appeared, though how he could have missed it is beyond him. The water rushes past, slate grey with a hint of green, arsenic-white crests where the water hits stone. “That might be the Styx, it might be the Nile, or perhaps it is the Huangquan, and leads to Diyu.”

“These are all places?” He looks at her.

“The world over gives many names to things which are the same.” She watches the river, her mouth in a flat line.

A small boat, sleek and long like a canal boat, appears on the water.  _ The ferryman. _ He knows it as if it were written on the back of his hand. A shiver of excitement travels down Sherlock’s spine. It’s been a long time since he’s felt anything other than a mix of cold and numb. The ferryman looks out from beneath his black hood, and a macabre skeletal grin is the first thing Sherlock sees. When Sherlock looks again, the ferryman is a jackal-headed god from one of his many world history books. The fur shines in the diluted light, and the headdress sparkles with a light all its own. 

In the sky are two black birds, wheeling about as if in play. “Huginn and Muninn?” he asks.

The woman smiles, but it’s sad. Her eyes glimmer. “In a sense. Did you know, Sherlock, that many cultures saw crows and ravens as the symbol of marital happiness? They were seen as the embodiment of lifelong fidelity and eternal bonding.” The boat and its ferryman is gone, swallowed by the river. The river recedes, becomes a dry bed. Green sprouts push through the cracked earth. It’s a field of crops - nothing he recognizes - and the earth is black and rich.

“No.” Sherlock has never given much thought to marriage, beyond the fact that he knows his parents are married, and other people’s parents are either married or divorced, or were never married at all. 

His parents are upset right now, and he hasn’t seen his father in days.

“Did you ever think you might marry while you were human?” the woman asks.

“No,” Sherlock says. “There were more important things to think about.”

The woman laughs softly. “You always did chafe against the reins of Love.” Her shoulders sag beneath the weight of her cloak.

“Are you sad?” he asks. Before his eyes, she seems to grow smaller, disappear beneath the mass of feathers, until the wind picks up, and the feathers are swept away to reveal a single black bird.

John.

“I thought you were a boy,” Sherlock says.

“We are what they make us, and what they need. Once we were Grip and Mabel, and we left the Tower of London, taking with us the might of the British Empire.” The ground beneath them changes to stone, and there they are, above another river, brown like silt. The wind pushes Sherlock’s curls from his face. “This is the Thames,” John says. “We’re on the Tower Bridge.” The view is breath-taking, a grey sky over the water, buildings of differing architectural types lining up on the banks, boats gliding across the surface, the chatter of birds in the air alongside the cacophony of engines running and horns honking. People, somewhere, singing, laughing, and fighting. 

But John, and what he’s saying, is more interesting.

“I’ve read about Grip and Mabel,” Sherlock says. “They were the last ravens living in the Tower during World War II. Mabel left first, and then her mate Grip, during the bombings of London.” 

The bird seems to smile at him. “You were Mabel.”

Sherlock scoffs. “You’re bloody ridiculous.” It feels good to use that word; his mother uses it sometimes, but will threaten Sherlock with soap if he cusses in either American or UK English. 

John only shakes his head. “You’re stubborn, still.”

“And you’re saying I left the Tower first? You left it, too.”

“In search of my mate,” John says. He lowers his head. “I am lost, and alone, without you. I will always follow you.”

As the words sink in, Sherlock is stunned. “What...why?” 

“Don’t you know?” the bird asks, as if surprised. 

Frustration rises in his mind as his hands ball into fists. "We don't even know each other," he says.

John hops closer, his head tilted to see Sherlock. “You really have forgotten everything. You’ve forgotten me.” He turns his beak away and looks out over the water. He seems sad.

“I…” Sherlock's chest seems tight. He presses his hand to it. Something is lodged there, below his sternum. “I’m not sure.”

“When Noah released you from the Ark -”

“When  _ what?”  _ He drops his hand as he spins toward the bird.

“Before the dove. We were cast along this bit of ocean and searching for land, after the Flood. Noah released you and off you flew. I resented you in that moment, so eager you were for freedom and for sating your curiosity. You wanted to see how the world looked. Noah released you, and you were to come back to us if you found land. Time passed, and you didn’t return. Noah released the dove, and the dove came back with her olive branch. I knew then, I knew that you’d gone and left us. So the moment we touched upon land and were released, I went in search of you. I found you glutting yourself on the corpses of the drowned.” John plucks a feather from his chest in a fit of anger. “You never thought of anyone but yourself. And still, I come to you. Still, I yearn for you, like a fool.”

His mind spins. Pins prick along his spine as images of other worlds, other creatures, flip through his head like a picture book. “Why?”

“Because you are the more clever of us, and I am an idiot.” The bird hops away as Sherlock takes a step toward him. “And sometimes, I wish it were possible for you to be something you’re not. I am a fool.”

They’re quiet as the noise dims around them. The bridge and river and buildings fade away until they’re left on an ominous grey cloud. 

“Once, we created a corner of the world, together," John says in a low voice. "I was known as their Creator; the people and the other animals would pray to me. You had no interest in that sort of thing, of course. But, in the beginning, I gave gifts to all the animals, and to the Seagull, I gave the moon, the sun, and the stars. The animals were meant to share their gifts, and when it came to Seagull’s turn, they refused. Tucked the box beneath their wing and claimed the gift as only theirs. No matter how much I charmed or flattered, or begged and beguiled, Seagull refused to share, and the world couldn’t begin properly. 

“You took matters into your own hands. You pushed a thorn into Seagull’s foot. Pushed it in until Seagull cried out and agreed to share the gift. You knew that was the only way to get Seagull to share - had even warned me of it before I gave out the gifts. You knew Seagull’s nature, and though it was cruel, it was you who gave the world its moon, sun, and stars.”

In his ears, the blood-curdling screams of a seagull ring. Sherlock stares down at his feet, which seem suddenly all too human to him. “I sound like a right bully.”

“You knew how to get things done.” John looks away again.

They’re back at the river. This time, Sherlock stares at it, the water moving sluggishly along, shadows undulating beneath the surface. Are they souls? The damned? The suffering?

He thinks again of his parents. Of his life as a boy. 

The strange dreams he’s had while growing up.

“I once dreamt I lived in a country called Serbia,” he says.

“We fed well there,” John says.

“On the dead. On the fallen.” Sherlock remembers looking down on feet that weren’t human at all, but scaled and taloned, and slick with blood. “It was a war.”

“There are always wars, all over,” John murmurs.

“Was I always so wicked?” he asks himself.

“We did what was necessary. Without carrion birds, disease will spread among the living.” John faces him. “You were the one who figured that out. Death and the consumption of the dead provides a service to Life.”

“For selfish reasons, I think.”

“It was not always gluttony. You showed Cain how to bury his brother Abel.” The scene before them changes to a bearded man in a rough-spun tunic on his knees, stones scattered around him. Blood pooled on the dry, sandy ground from the body of a man that lay before him. A crow scratches the ground not far from him. 

John sighs. “It is for the good of everyone that we consume the dead. It was for the good of Cain, what little there was in him, that you tried to teach him. You always were on the side of the angels.”

“But not one of them?” Sherlock asks, as if some kernel of a memory bypasses his brain and fills his mouth.

“No. But then, that’s not who we are.”

“Who are we?” Sherlock asks.

“Right now? Right now, we are simply Sherlock and John.” 

And for a second, Sherlock swears the black bird smiles, if a bird could smile.

* * *

Over the past week, she’s been catching a glimpse of the creature now and then. The shadow of a black bird in the cherry tree. The bird doesn’t eat from the tray of peanuts. Has no interest in any of the feeders, or the birds that flock to them. Simply settles among the branches, watching through the window like an eerie spectator. As if the impending death of her son was a spectator sport.

Today she can see him clearly. He's perched on one of the lower branches.

Closer to the window. 

A white hot fury bursts within her chest and a strength she hasn’t felt in ages ricochets throughout her muscles and sinew as she shakes her bones from their torpor and pounds her feet out the back door.

“You can’t have him!” she screams. Roars. Loud enough that she hopes to god the heavens can hear her, that her very voice might shake the bird right out of the tree to fall to the ground where she can wring its neck. “You can’t have him!”

A flurry of wings flash at the bird feeders as the songbirds make their escape into the highest branches of nearby trees. The crow, or raven, or jackdaw, or whatever it might be, seems to blend into the dark limbs of the tree. For an instant, she thinks she sees him, but nothing is there when she peers closer. A glimpse of him there, or maybe there, in the stippled shade.

Nothing.

Just herself, and an impotent rage, her fists clenched and her chest heaving like a bellows. 

Just an animal, subject to all the laws of nature, and nothing more.


	4. An Unkindness

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much to all those who read, dropped kudos, and commented as this went along. I don't expect that it will be reading material for many with these kinds of tags, but like I said, it is special to me. I am very grateful that an audience found it and appreciated it. Thank you.

Again in the chaos of the battlefield: the one-eyed man on his horse and the wolf-beast charge at one another. Fighting and screaming crescendos into a cacophonous frenzy, and when the darkness descends, the sound is suddenly muted, as if Sherlock’s ears are filled with cotton. He realizes that it’s not the mere obfuscation of light, but the descent of thousands of black birds, flying together as fluidly as a river. 

As he watches, something twists in his chest. He’d never thought himself a cruel person. Yet the things John has told him, the things he’s beginning to remember… He wraps his thin arms around himself. “So, you mean to say that, of the two of us, I am the more wicked?” 

“As I have already said, you are the more clever.”

As the scene before him shifts shape like a slow-moving chimera, memories flood him. Fair-skinned Coronis, whom Apollo loved. Sherlock had seen her, swollen with the child of the sun-god. She fell in love with a mortal man, and when she chose to lay with him, Sherlock could not ignore her transgression. He was a white raven, then, and sent to guard her. John and he had preened plumages of many colours, before their time with Apollo. 

He reported her infidelity to the sun lord, who took revenge by killing Coronis and her lover with his arrows. His anger turned Sherlock’s feathers black, and never again could he fan out a tail of white, or purple, or whatever struck his fancy. But black was a color Sherlock grew to love. It kept others at a distance, it marked him as a vanguard and a trickster, as a portent of death and a creature to be feared, much like the river of birds before him. 

It kept him alone, aside from his faithful companion: John.

_ Oh. I am…  _ Sherlock turns to the bird. “Why am I in this human body? It hurts. I’m cold all the time. It’s hateful.”

John’s sharp, ebony eyes focus on him. “You don’t remember?”

“No...some things are still hazy...my mind is in disarray.” His fingers tunnel through his hair and pull, as if he could force the memories from his cerebral cortex to the forefront of his mind, snap his soul back into place, though what that place is he doesn’t yet understand.

“You wanted to know what it meant to be human. What it meant to die.”

“I... _ what? _ I decided to do that?”

John lowers his head, his beak almost touching the ground. “I tried to prevent it. But I knew too late. You never trust me enough to tell me.”

Sherlock’s heart squeezes. 

Odin’s sad one-eyed gaze. Seagull’s tormented cries. Apollo’s blaze of anger.

His mother’s - his  _ mother _ \- glimmering eyes, maternal resolve overcome by the vagaries of life.

It’s as if his ribs pull in on themselves, compressing the organs beneath, and that thing, whatever it is, still lodged in his chest, still stuck, and cold.

“Oh,” he says. “Oh.”

* * *

The funeral is Saturday. 

In her chest where her heart used to be is a piece of stone, once volcanic, but now cooled and hard. Maybe enough pressure over time will make it as hard as a diamond, but for now, she fears it’ll break and she’ll never be able to put it back together, all crumbled dust and razor-thin shards. 

Siger has been handling the funeral arrangements. Meanwhile, she smokes a cigarette and Mrs Hudson holds her hand. She hadn’t realized that Mrs Hudson was just as much there for the living as she was for the dying. Somehow her presence has become a soothing constant, like the return of the sun each morning. Viola can’t be sure that the woman has gone home since his passing.

Sherlock’s collections of natural items are going into shadow boxes to hang in his room, except for the heart-shaped rocks. They’ll remain on the window sill, rather like a line of tiny headstones. His books are being donated to the local library. While Viola has fallen mute, Mrs Hudson has chattered with visitors, directed well-meaning members of the family, and listened to their tales of how brilliant Sherlock was, how he could catalogue everything in a room and know what a person had been up to just by looking at them. How the world had lost a shining star.

Now, the two women sit. Mrs Hudson holds her hand as she sips tea. Viola stares into the backyard. The bird in the tree is gone. The bird feeders are empty and she can’t bring herself to fill them. They hang like empty husks, which is what she’s become, she realizes.

“Gibran says ‘you are the bow from which your children as living arrows are set forth,’” she remarks, her voice low and gravelly from smoking and disuse. 

“Mm,” Mrs Hudson replies.

“And, I always thought, when life is hard, when we experience challenges, that there are lessons to be learned in those challenges.”

“Yes,” Mrs Hudson says.

“Well, what the bloody fuck is the lesson in this?” Viola says, her voice lifting with the force of her anger. “What use is it to me to have him die? What lesson can be learned in that? It was nothing I could prevent - no matter how much I loved him, no matter how much money we had - ”

Mrs Hudson squeezes her hand. 

“And this world, how can it just go on? People are going to work and coming home from work and having dinner, and I sit here, and I’ve lost my son and my meaning in life, and how am I supposed to go on? What is the point?” Hot tears rush down her face as her chest seems to crack open pouring forth tidal waters and floods of grief. “My child is dead and I am nothing, now,  _ I’m nothing _ !” 

The last words collapse into a wail as Mrs Hudson wraps her into her thin arms and holds her, cradles her, rocks her like a child. 

“What is the point?” she whimpers, and tastes the salt of her tears.

* * *

Sherlock and John stand, shoulder to shoulder, at the river of water again. The birds have left. This time they are grown men. John is slight, short, with blond hair and eyes as blue as the night sky. Sherlock is tall, raven-haired, with eyes the colour of the swirling sea. 

“I think I swallowed something,” Sherlock says, pressing over his chest with his fingers. He’s still deciding, still thinking, about his long life as the Corvid, and his brief life as a human. Everything hurts inside.

“When you decided to embark upon this experiment, you swallowed what you called your most precious thing, so you could take it with you,” John says.

“What was that?”

“Think. It’s somewhere in that mind.” His smile is beautiful, if a little pained.

Sherlock palpates the surface of his chest. He can feel it: a lump beneath his sternum. If he could just pry his fingers beneath his breastbone, he could reach it, hook it with his fingers and pull it out. Instead, he makes a guttural noise, bends his shoulders, crouches over the hard ground of the riverbank. He coughs up something small and dark, and it lands in a pool of spittle and bile on the dirt.

A heart-shaped stone. He picks it up. It gleams in the diluted light of this in-between place. 

“I...my most precious thing?”

John gives a little laugh. “I always thought it was your most precious thing. You hid it so no one could have it. Your heart.” He lifts his chin, almost in defiance. “Not even me.”

Sherlock reads the hurt on the man’s face, and in his voice. And though what is supposed to be his heart lays in his hand, something tugs in his chest. The realization creeps over him like a shadow growing in the sun’s dwindling light. This beautiful, fascinating creature has followed him through life and through death, and has loved him without condition. 

And he is here to call Sherlock home, prepared to carry him across the river.

John, brilliant, wonderful John is hurting, and because of Sherlock’s carelessness. The grief is old, but John - Muninn, Creator, Death’s Handmaiden, Carrion-eater - carries it with him in the hopes Sherlock would someday see it, and perhaps, repair it.

It’s nothing like the ravaging pain that his mother wore so plainly on her face in his last months as a fourteen year-old boy, but then, this grief is far older.

His mother.

“My mother loves me.” He stares off into the distance, closing a fist around the rock. Pain bounces around inside him, an agony that bears no immediate salve. “A human life is so thin, as thin as a blade of grass in a wide field, one among so many. But beneath it all are roots that are entangled with one another.”  _ To be human. _

He startles when John’s hand clasps his shoulder. John’s face blurs in his vision - Sherlock's face is wet. “Oh,” he realizes. It's tears, and: “I loved - I  _ love _ , my mother.” He’d no doubt spoken the words to her. He was fond of her, certainly, attached in the way that all humans find attachments. But love? Oh, how he loved her, and she loved him. 

“What did you learn of love?” John asks. 

Sherlock grimaces as he strokes a finger over the stone in his palm. “I may be smarter, but you are the wiser, are you not? I’ve seen a great many awful things, but I have known a great many beautiful things - I saw it but I did not observe it, did I? All these millenia I have existed and I ignored it. What wisdom is there in that?"

He almost smiles then. “I suppose, in that, I am most like humans. And in this experiment, I have learned that what sustains us, and that what sustains them, is love. But you’re wiser than me, John. You’ve known that all along, haven’t you?”

John’s smile fades. “It is one thing to think it; it is profoundly different to experience it.”

“Yes, I agree,” Sherlock says as his heart grows joyful. The discovery is momentous - all along, this thing was looking at him in the face. He was surrounded by it while he watched humans and other animals struggle - even the gods themselves struggled. As he stares at John, old memories pour into him, like water into a vessel. John at the dawn of time, his mate. John in many skins - the many different birds they’ve masked themselves as, and still, always together, always them. Laughing, arguing, fucking, plotting, and watching. He remembers what John had told him earlier, about crows and ravens as the symbol of marital happiness - how they’d gone through their very, very long incarnation as each other’s one and only. Despite Sherlock’s selfish decisions, despite his objection to softer emotions, John remained ever at his side. And didn’t John deserve better? Hadn’t Sherlock learned how to be better?

In so brief a life, he'd learned to be better. 

He bends his head to John’s.

John stops him by pressing two fingers to his lips. They’re warm, and the skin slightly callused. “Can I trust you? Can I even trust this?” His voice borders on angry.

Sherlock flinches. It’s what he deserves, but he’s spun about by his realizations, and by this newfound jubilation. He tries to ignore the hurt in his gut. “What is it that stops you?”

“You...you took this fall into being human without even telling me. You left me behind, as you always do.”

Sherlock blinks away his tears as another memory filters through his mind. Old Odin, and what he’d said once: ‘Huginn and Muninn fly every day over all the world; I worry for Huginn that he might not return, but I worry more for Muninn.’ 

“Oh, that’s what he meant,” Sherlock whispers. 

“Hm?”

“Odin worried for you. He knew my nature,” Sherlock says, as a new sadness wells up within his rib cage. “I wasn’t fair to you. I was cruel and I was thoughtless. It was ego and hubris. It was eternity and it was a game. I didn’t appreciate all your acts of love. ”

John looks down at the stone in Sherlock’s hand. 

“John,” Sherlock says. John meets his eyes. “The stone is a metaphor. Love can’t be contained in a vessel.”

John’s face seems alight with something like hope. “You have changed.”

“I believe...I have.” His mind wanders again to his mother. His mother and yet not his mother. The woman who - despite his follies and his pride, despite his mistreatment of her at times - loved him and fought for him. 

The scene around them changes, and there they are in Sherlock’s nursery, his mother rocking him to sleep. Again, it shifts, and there they are on the pavement, Sherlock’s scraped knee and his mother armed with a plaster and a kiss. And there, his mother teaching him how to throw a punch - how that had scandalised the neighbour who saw them! Another change: them laughing together on a sofa at some show on the telly. 

Young Sherlock screaming “I hate you!” and his mother responding with a calm, “I still love you, anyway.” 

The last scene is his father and his mother, in an embrace. His father lifts his hand and invites Sherlock to join their hug. Sherlock, petulant and sullen, shakes his head. His parents laugh and hug each other harder. Sherlock came to the realisation that he felt left out, so he ran to join them, in their perfect, wiggling triad.

“I didn’t realize that it could be like that,” Sherlock says. “That it could be...unconditional. Selfless, even. She wasn’t perfect, but then, neither was I. And still, she loved me.”

He looks down at his hand and pockets the stone. Takes John’s hands. “I’ve learned so much in so little time. Again and again, you have forgiven me. I should have known what it was you were saying all along. And, I love you, too.”

John searches his face, peers into his eyes. His hands are warm in Sherlock’s, and the air is humid between them as John steps closer, the moment seeming to stretch into forever. “Okay,” John says. “We can start again. From here.” He leans in. 

The kiss seems to steal Sherlock’s breath. Warm lips ghosting along his, warm hands holding his. “Take me home,” Sherlock whispers to John. The darkness eddies around them. 

* * *

The day after the funeral, Viola finds herself sitting on the back steps near the bird feeders. Someone’s filled them with seed, and tiny songbirds dash back and forth in the dwindling light. The urge to stand and shout, “He’s dead; how can you all go on!?” nudges her from time to time, but it seems safer to stay still, as still as she possibly can, and hope no one and nothing ever notices her again. The world will go on around her - American children are shouting and laughing in the distance. It’s Halloween night, and their door is the only darkened one on the street. No stringy cobwebs or eldritch lights festoon their front porch, no grinning jack-o-lantern sits in the window. Instead, she’s buried her child, at a spooky time of the year when it’s said the veil between the dead and the living is thin.

There’s no comfort to be found in that. The trees around them will grow and grow old and fall and decay. The world will go on and on, and all will be rocked in the eternal rhythms of the earth, veil or no. 

She sits and takes in the amber sky. Mrs Hudson seems to have gone somewhere, though she has no doubt the woman will show up again at some point. 

A movement in the cherry tree draws her attention. The black bird is back, and with it, a second bird.

Her heart thumps. The thump surprises her - she’d almost expected the organ to be actual stone or dust at this point.

The second black bird holds something in its beak. When it glides toward her, she doesn’t move. It hops to her feet. Larger than a crow, smaller than a raven. Sharp, black eyes and feathers that shimmer with the slightest suggestion of violet. 

The bird places something at her feet. When she looks, her heart thunders in her ears, and her throat constricts. 

A stone. Shaped like a heart.

The bird glances up at her and hops away. She reaches down and picks up the offering, rubbing the smooth, cool surface of the stone with her fingertips. Her other hand goes to her lips. Dry, chapped. But movement distracts her foggy mind.

The other bird has joined them. The two touch beaks. She watches, almost disbelieving. There are two birds now, when she’d seen only one before Sherlock died. And this bird, this new bird, has handed her a heart-shaped rock, much like the collection belonging to her dead son. She holds the evidence here in her hand. 

The birds move away; they meld into the lengthening shade of the tree until it becomes difficult to see them clearly, just spectres in the shade. The screen door creaks open behind her.

Siger settles on the step beside her, and takes her hand. His temples are greyer than she remembers. He looks kindly at her, though grief is furrowed in his face. They’ve been grieving in separate pockets, but maybe, it’s time to come together again.

The birds take off. Their raucous cries echo across the neighbourhood as she watches them go.

_ Sherlock and John, _ she thinks, _soaring and silhouetted against the dusky twilight. Gone, into the gloaming._


End file.
